I sat up in the dark and said, Yeah, I am.
And William came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed; there was just a little moonlight and so I could not see his face clearly, but I understood immediately that he was distressed. “Lucy,” he said. And then nothing more. So I finally said, “What is it, Pill?”
“Don’t you want to know what I wrote back to Lois Bubar?”
I sat up straighter and I said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry I never asked. I had forgotten about her because of everything with Becka. Oh, I’m so sorry! Tell me what you wrote.”
So William went and got his computer and he sat back down on the edge of my bed. I cannot remember exactly what he read to me, but it was very well written and he’d concluded by saying he thought now that he had lived the life of a boy and not a real man, and he was very sorry that this was the case. I guess many of us have regrets, he wrote, but my regrets seem to grow as I get older. And he finished by saying that he was terribly sorry that his mother had never spoken to him about his having a sister; he said he found it almost unforgivable, and he was deeply sorry. And he wished her only the best as well.
He looked at me with embarrassed expectation on his face. “That’s beautiful,” I said, “that’s a really nice email. Did she get back to you?”
And he said, “She did. Just tonight.” He read again from his computer. Lois had been extremely polite in what she wrote to him, saying she understood it was not his fault in any way that their mother had behaved as she had. I have pity for her in my heart these days, Lois wrote. I understand that you find it unforgivable, but please know that I no longer feel that way. Your (our) mother knew I would be well taken care of, and I was. And then Lois had written: I hope you won’t mind if I sign this with love. Love, Lois—your sister.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “William, that’s lovely!” Then I said, “Write her back right away and say you’re pleased she signed it with love, and then you sign it with love. Or whatever.”
“Oh, I will. I will.” He sat there in the semi-darkness looking down at his closed computer.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
I saw him look over at me in the semi-darkness and he said, “Oh, nothing. I just make myself sick, that’s all.”
I waited, watching him, but he said no more. And so I said, “Because of Pam Carlson and Bob Burgess? Did he ever know about you and Pam?”
And William said, “No, she never told him. She was getting around quite a bit—”
“So were you,” I said, but I did not say it meanly. I did not feel any meanness as I said it.
“I know, I know.” William ran his hand over his hair. “He’s a nice guy, isn’t he.”
And I said, “I love him.”
“I know. You told me that.” Then William said, and I thought it was so odd, “I wish I had been more like him.”
“You wish you had married Margaret and gotten stuck up here in Maine?”
And he said quietly, “No. But you know what I mean. I watch Becka go through this hell, and that’s what I did with you.”
I thought about this. I said, “She’s doing a lot better than I was at that point.” It seemed to be true. Then I added, “But I think she really maybe hasn’t liked him for a long time.” And I thought about that, and William evidently thought about it as well, because he said, “So you still liked me when you found out?”
“Oh God, yes. I loved you.”
William sighed hugely. “Oh Button,” he said.
“Pillie, we don’t need to have this conversation anymore.”
“Okay,” he said. Then he said, “Hey, do you know who I was thinking of today, just out of the blue? The Turners, do you remember them?”
And I said, “Yes, you know I think I heard she had a breakdown—”
And we talked then. We talked for hours, William sat up next to me in my bed, and we talked about all the people we had known together, what had become of them. And then we both got tired.
“Go to sleep,” I said, and William stood up and said, “Nice talk, Lucy.”
“Great talk,” I said, and I could sort of feel us both smiling as he went back to his room next door.
iv
I got to know the tides; I mean I got to understand when they went out and came back in, and they comforted me. I would watch the swirling water as the tide came in, lapping its white swirl again and again upon the darkened rocks below us, and also against those two islands in front of us, and I would watch on days when the ocean seemed almost—briefly—flat, and I would watch the tide go out, leaving the wet rocks and the coppery yellowish seaweed. When I looked straight ahead there was nothing on the horizon past those two small islands, that is how far out the ocean went. I noticed how the sky tended to match the ocean; if the sky was gray—as it frequently was—the ocean seemed gray too, but when the sky was a bright blue, the ocean seemed a blue color, or sometimes a deep green if there were clouds and sun. The ocean was a huge comfort to me somehow, and those two islands were always there.
The sadness that rose and fell in me was like the tides.
* * *
But Becka seemed to disappear from me. I even felt she was avoiding me; I would call her and she would not call back for a day or two. When she did speak to me her voice was rather flat. “Mom, I’m really okay, please don’t worry so much about me,” she said. It hurt my heart with a heaviness as though a damp and dirty dishcloth lay across it.
But of course she was grieving her marriage, no matter how unhappy she may have been in it—this thought finally arrived to me. And I thought, Lucy, you are so stupid not to have realized that.
* * *
And then Elsie Waters came to me in a dream. She was anxious, but very much herself. She had come to check on me, and when she saw I was okay, she nodded and turned around and went back through a door. I understood the door was death. But I had been so glad to see her!
When I told William about the dream he said nothing. It annoyed me that he had nothing to say.
* * *
Every night we watched the news on the television, and I read it on my computer during the day. This will end, I kept thinking. This will have to end. And every night it did not end, or indicate in any way that it would ever end.
* * *
—
I asked William to explain to me about the virus and why it had gone so out of control and why they couldn’t stop it and why they couldn’t come up with a vaccine right away, and he did explain it to me. He added that it seemed to him there had to be a genetic component to it, that a person’s genes determined whether the virus could get access to them in a serious way or not. This might be why it was affecting people so differently.
I went through the days— I don’t know how I went through them.
* * *
But I will say this:
There were times, as William would sit at the small table in the corner of the living room and work on that puzzle of Van Gogh’s self-portrait, when I would suddenly sit across from him—as I said, I hate doing puzzles—but I might find a piece of Van Gogh’s cheekbone, let’s say, and I would snap it into place in the unfinished puzzle, and William would nod, “Good job, Lucy,” and I would think to myself: I am not unhappy.
v